Black Swan
"Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan") - Juvental
To quote wikipedia, "when [the above] phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic."
This saying was common in 16th century London, as an expression of impossibility. You can probably imagine the surprise then (among Europeans anyway) when Dutch explorer's first discovered black swans in the wilds of Western Australia in 1697.
It's certainly an interesting concept to consider. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is phrase I often repeat to myself when trying to avoid assuming certain things "impossible". But in the case of the black swan, where exactly was the smoke? The existence of white swans doesn't necessarily suggest the existence of black swans- at least not anymore than it might suggest the existence of red swans. And yet, just like that, "a wild black swan has appeared!"
I sometimes wonder if the existence of improbable phenomena is somehow made more probable simply by considering the possibility. In other words, how can we prove, with certainty, that black swans didn't exist before they were observed by those Dutch explorers? And what psychological biases played into their assumed nonexistence? Were there, for example, non European cultures that had long held written or oral records purporting the existence of black swans? And If your'e familiar with the idea of "Last Thursdayism", you might notice the potential depth of this particular rabbit hole...
So how can we train our minds to see "black swan events" coming? This observer bias seems to be key, and is noted by the popular risk analyst Nassim Taleb in his modern conception of black swan theory. He states "what may be a black swan surprise for a turkey is not a black swan surprise to its butcher; hence the objective should be to 'avoid being the turkey' by identifying areas of vulnerability in order to 'turn the Black Swans white'."
What could this mindset mean from a more practical perspective? Again I defer to Taleb, who says "I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant. Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the 'normal,' particularly with 'bell curve' methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty."
"Topogigio at the Swan Lake Benefit"
